Flashback Friday: Stop Discovering Your Spiritual Gift

Maybe you grew up in a church like mine, where your pastor preached a 147 week series a couple of times a year on how to discover your spiritual gift, with an exhaustive explanation on everything from prophecy to prayer and teaching to tongues (scratch that, Baptists don’t do tongues). And maybe, like me, you spent more than your fair share of years wondering exactly what your spiritual gift was. It was like Christmas every time you took another spiritual gifts test: “I hope I get discernment this time! I’ll bet it’s discer…aw man! Celibacy again!”

I think our spiritual gifts quests can be misguided at times. We spend so much energy trying to pinpoint exactly what our gift is, we unnecessarily delay the way in which God wants to use us. We’re so busy filling out surveys that we’re not actually serving.

Like this:

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By the time I graduated college (undergrad in Psychology) I took almost 20 personality and spiritual gift tests. I know way more than I ever wanted to know about myself. What’s crazy is that after the end of some of these tests (some lasting 10 min, some took me several hours to go through) they were spot on.

Here’s my conclusion: No test can tell you what your gifts are…only through A LOT OF HUMBLE SERVICE IN THE CHURCH AND IN THE COMMUNITY will find out what your real gifts are. Your service should emerge from your passion.

I would agree that we have overcomplicated the whole idea of spiritual gifts. I think we’ve taken something that Paul wrote and turned it into something with far more steps and hoops than it needs.

EVERY Christian has a gift & EVERY Christian has a different gift.
Every Christian has SOME gift, not every Christian has the same gift.